Diagrid, a Seattle startup that offers a fully managed Dapr on Kubernetes service, announced a $24.2 million Series A round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Amplify Partners and Quiet Capital.
The 10-person company was founded last year by CEO Mark Fussell and CTO Yaron Schneider, former Microsoft engineers who open-sourced the Dapr project in 2019. Dapr is a free runtime system to support cloud-native applications and serverless computing.
Diagrid provides API services to help developers reduce the complexity and time required to build business applications that run on public clouds. The company differentiates itself given the founders’ experience at Microsoft and creating Dapr, as well as KEDA, a Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaler.
Its software is used by groups such as IBM Research.
“Dapr and Diagrid move IBM’s Discovery Platform past the deployment and operations concerns inherent in Kubernetes, to simple and elegant repeatability, portability, and speed required to drive the demanding workloads that define acceleration in modern computational scientific discovery,” Karl Wehden, IBM Research product director, said in a statement.
Fussell spent nearly 22 years at Microsoft, most recently leading the Azure Office of the CTO Incubations Team. Schneider was there for nearly seven years, most recently as principal software engineer on the Azure Container Apps team.
Other backers of Diagrid include Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich; Kubernetes co-founder and Heptio founder Joe Beda; Envoy creator Matt Klein; Buoyant CEO William Morgan; ex-Heroku CEO Adam Gross; former Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath; Google engineer Seth Vargo; Bolt engineering director Roopak Venkatakrishnan; Kris Nova; and Adam Frankl.